I got a quaint reminder of the 19th century this morning. I needed to renew my work card (titre de sejour — sort of my greencard).

It cost 269 euros now!

But I’m not allowed to just pay for it. Non… I first had to go to another line so that I could use my credit card to buy two €90 revenue stamps, two €30 stamps, two €10 stamps, an €8 stamp and a €1 stamp. Then I went to another line and gave them to the lady as payment for my work card. She dumped them into an envelope and moved on.

I have to admit that I was scandalized when I saw the poster in this shop window. Would this even be legal in the US? It would certainly be de-funded and have a wall built around it. Or get made into a cable series.

If you hear someone in France talking about the “vay-say”, which you would probably write as “VC”, it’s not the Viet Cong or the Victoria Cross or Venture Capital, or something like this.

It’s actually not even VC. It’s supposed to be “WC”, but apparently the “double” is too difficult to say. So instead of “dooble-vay say”, it becomes “vay say”. So it means WC. Which is actually English for Water Closet.

So, in France, via tortured evolution, one way to say toilet in French is “vay-say”.

Most of my messages after the new year start like this. It’s like clockwork! The difficult part is knowing when to stop. It’s January 10th and most of many of my messages still have this. I don’t think it goes longer than a couple of weeks, and you’re really not supposed to wish someone a happy new year twice, of course.

It really reminds me of my “Bonjour” problem. You’re absolutely supposed to say “bonjour” to people when you first see them, but it seems to be a total faux-pas to say it twice to the same person in the same day!

Here’s something that’s made me wonder a bit. At the right is a football (American, of course. 🙂 Taken from Wikipedia and edited a bit) kickoff. We all know what it looks like — ball tilted a bit towards the kicker, so we can kick it in the center of its length.

What confuses me is the difference with rugby. Below I’ve got a picture of the basic equivalent to a kickoff in rugby. Notice that here the ball is actually tilted away from the kicker. I guess this is because the rugby, while similar to a US football, is actually rounder at the ends, so you can actually kick it there, and probably get the ball further, since it’s harder.

But since I’ve never met anyone who’s played both American football and rugby, I don’t know how to confirm this!

(And for those that actually know rugby and recognize the player: yes, I’ve “inverted” the picture left-right to make it resemble the US Football picture. But this shouldn’t change the discussion…).

My work doesn’t provide flu shots for us, so we’ve got to do it ourselves — really ourselves. You can buy a shot in any pharmacy for about $7. Then, you can get an official nurse to give it to you, but you can also get a family member or, yes, I do it myself…